“It seems that only now we realize…”

by Alex Steffenon November 18, 2011

I’m somewhat obsessed these days by the W.S. Merwin poem The Iceberg, especially these lines, which I take to be in part a meditation on the existential crisis humanity is struggling with as we come to understand a incomprehensibly large and ancient universe in which we are, as far as we know, alone:

“…It seems that only nowWe realize the depth of the water, theAbyss over which we float among suchClouds. And still not understandingThe coldness of most elegance, evenWith so vast and heartless a splendorBefore us, stare, caught in the magnetismOf great silence, thinking: this is the terrorThat cannot be charted, this is onlyA little of it.”

Glimpsing the true nature of our situation has driven humanity half crazy, I sometimes think. Yet I am optimistic that we may come through this a profoundly more mature, and perhaps far bolder, species. And at the very heart of the maturation is planetary thinking.